The U.S. Department of Education on Thursday announced 65 new grant awards to boost school mental health services, the latest development in a seven-month saga that involved the cancellation of more than 200 previously awarded grants and legal efforts to reverse those terminations.
The agency said it’s awarding more than $208 million to boost the ranks of school psychologists working in schools and training for future school psychologists. It didn’t identify the grant recipients in a news release, but said 33 serve rural areas and that rural areas account for more than $120 million of the grant funding.
School districts and state education departments were eligible to apply for the grants under competitions the Education Department launched in late September. One competition was for grants to help schools hire and retain mental health professionals—in this case, school psychologists. The other was to fund training initiatives for future school psychologists.
The new awards cap off seven months during which grant recipients who received awards from the Biden administration received surprise notices that their funding would end. In some cases, those notices came just months into their five-year initiatives. The awardees scrambled to preserve their funding by unsuccessfully appealing to the Education Department, seeking help from congressional representatives, and launching legal challenges.
In April, the Trump administration had sent notices to 223 grant recipients—of 339 with active projects—telling them their work reflected Biden administration priorities and that their projects were now “inconsistent” with “the best interest of the federal government.” The notices told the grantees their funding would end Dec. 31.
The grant terminations were an early example of the new Trump administration cutting projects that it claimed promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion—principles the administration has opposed across many education programs. Grantees during the Biden administration had to show how their efforts would boost the diversity of mental health professionals and the number of them who come from the communities they’re serving in schools.
As it discontinued the in-progress awards, the Education Department pledged to launch a new grant competition and award the reclaimed funds by the end of the year. In a statement Thursday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon noted that initially “there was doubt” the administration could issue new awards by that deadline.
But, she said, “we are proud to announce we did exactly that. Today, over $200 million is being awarded directly to states and school districts to support student mental health—a meaningful win for our education system.”
The Education Department launched the new grant competitions in late September, limiting the funds to focus only on boosting the numbers of school psychologists rather than the full range of mental health specialists the previous awards supported. Also gone was the Biden-era preference for applicants who focused on boosting the specialists’ diversity. Universities—which carried out many of the training initiatives—were also excluded from this new competition.
Meanwhile, legal challenges created new uncertainty about the new awards.
In late October, a Seattle-based federal judge ruled in response to a lawsuit from 16 Democratic state attorneys general that the April termination notices were likely invalid because they contained no individualized reasoning for stopping the in-progress grants.
Her order blocked the notices for 49 grantees out of the 223 nationwide whose projects the administration planned to end.
As it stands now, those 49 grantees are still on track to have their funding continued past Dec. 31. The $208 million awarded Thursday falls short of the $270 million the administration estimated it would give out when it launched the grant competitions in September, likely preserving money for those grantees.
Meanwhile, legal proceedings continue in the 16-state lawsuit challenging the April terminations, with a hearing on Thursday.
